How we solved a challenging VAT audit request

In November 2017, we were contacted by Plantronics because they were appointed for a VAT audit for their German branch. The deadline was December 5, a date where we traditionally celebrate ‘Sinterklaas’ in the Netherlands (a kind of Santa Claus). The tax authorities requested extracts of their financial data from 2011 up to 2016.

Usually, this is not a big effort since itax4apps supports the German GDPdR format (which is a predecessor of the commonly used SAF-T formats in other countries). But there was one major challenge: the data was available in two separate Oracle systems! The financial data for 2015 and 2016 was available in Oracle EBS 12.1, but the other years were stored in an (archived) Oracle 11i environment, somewhere in the US…

On top of that, this 11i environment had completely different organisation structures, chart of accounts and tax setup. A very challenging request!

Our approach

We connected itax4apps to the 11i environment, mapped the rates, made a lot of data transformations and reconciled all the data. After that, we combined it with the already available R12 data and generated the output files in the GDPdU format.

On December 5, Laurens personally handed a USB-stick (containing the data-files and the accompanying Excel reports) to mr. Rob Frankfort (International Tax Manager at Plantronics) at Amsterdam Central Station. The train departed a few minutes later, including Rob and the USB-stick, on the way to his meeting with the tax inspector in Cologne, Germany.

The result

Today we received the following feedback from Plantronics:

“I got the assessment last week Monday (19-03-2018), no changes made by the tax inspector which means a good thing for us but also thanks to the files you made for us, both from Oracle 11 as well as Oracle 12. The inspector was very pleased with this as she was afraid she had to pick up Oracle knowledge but we were able to deliver our accounting materials in the German Idea format *) and Excel.

Thanks therefore and also the timing, on my way to Cologne we had a short meeting at Amsterdam Central station where you handed the files to me. Very good result, thanks to you and the team.”

*) Idea is the software from Caseware that the German Tax Authorities use to perform their Tax Analysis and Audits.

This is what motivates us: making the difference on challenging tax issues and exceeding our customer’s expectations!